New Relic changes business model, open-sources agents and instrumentation

This is the exact same situation my company finds itself in. We are stuck with it because they have decent APM metrics for .NET Java and JavaScript and it’s nice it’s all in one dashboard. The new UI is pretty difficult to use and way too bright. Currently exploring other options and would be happy to switch to a more affordable competitor.

We had a call with them this week. Basically you pay a flat fee for a pool of traffic / resources. No longer billed by instances.

I've long preferred New Relic as well - it always seemed the most natural to use; the information that was important was easy to find. Some other APM's didn't even seem to be recording accurate metrics, but ones that did were still more difficult to navigate.

I've also had some issues with New Relic - constant problems with metric names exploding. Individual unique urls that saw especially high traffic routinely ended up getting their own unique metric name until new metric name creation would get locked. This would be despite us explicitly naming requests through the sdk.

All that said, the biggest reason I still use them is because we're still on some ancient pricing that's a fraction of their current (up until now) pricing. Our rep's been bugging me to get on a call about "renewal" but if our price is going to go up 5-10x I'm moving.

YUP ran into the exact same thing.

"Well you learn things from development environments." Yes I know, but I'm paying a pretty penny to monitor production environments, and other places give development licenses for free.

Interestingly, Datadog's agent was a fork of Server Density's open-source agent[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datadog#Technology

It only shows how high is their client inertia and how shielded they were from competition. A lot of companies where moving to Datadog was more expensive than continuing to pay for New Relic.

shrinking profits

I've mostly worked for companies that were all in on things like open source and cloud my entire career, but it's easy to forget that there are huge companies that just recently replaced their tape drives.

If I were to guess at the "sea change" discussed herein I'd say it's probably the explosion of tech around Kubernetes and the CNCF, as that created a very sudden and urgent need for better observability tooling.

- I typed these words all by myself and they are not official New Relic words, you can tell because they're not terribly well-formed and they aren't surrounded by logos and trademarks and buzzwords. Using the haphazardly spewed opinions of strangers on the internet as investment advice is a really, really terrible idea; like "open source is a virus" level of bad. Don't do it.

Maybe Elastic APM fits your need? It works well on-prem as well as on the Elastic hosted offering and you can get started for free.

Disclosure: I work for Elastic

Sometimes it is. I was heavily involved with a decision between Datadog vs New Relic (plus a few others) at a former "unicorn" startup. We definitely did not want to run the server-side ourselves, but having the client libraries be open source was a major advantage for Datadog. It let us extend them to support our very old Django version and homegrown SOA framework

I've had some success convincing anti-cloud (cloud reticent?) companies by pointing to things like FedRAMP compliance: "You know how hard it is to get ______ compliance? Your data is probably safer there..." kind of conversations.

I'm sure your mileage will vary but in my not so humble opinion companies that are still trying to cling to their aging fleet of servers are making pretty poor business decisions. I think this internet stuff is catching on.

- I work at NR, these questionable opinions are mine and not those of my employer though I might have stolen them from my friend Vicky who yells about software a lot. Don't buy stock because I typed some words on a webpage that's ridiculous, also maybe don't buy stock period. Buy bitcoin it's the new pet rocks.

Dynatrace and AppDynamics are available as on-premise APM solutions, a bit on the expensive side though!

Why do you care about where the server is? Is it because of privacy/ data regulation requirements?

Won't running servers in house be a cumbersome task

My understanding is that it has more to do with the general direction of observability. The agent code was always open, we frequently accepted PRs from the community when I was on their Ruby agent team, but they didn't use an open source license.

We're public so I probably shouldn't guess too much about the motivations beyond the explosion of interest in observability/kubernetes/cncf, but I do know there has been support for open sourcing these for a long time within the company and I'm glad to see it finally happen.

disclosure: I work at NR but my opinions are in fact cake and should not be used to make investment decisions (seriously that is a terrible idea I mostly invest in LEGOs and Magic cards)

I agree, but they might have been scared that someone wrote a NewRelic compatible server.

While I do not condone the use of the s-word here I understand the sentiment and I am also glad to see that they've open sourced them, however belated the decision.

With regard to opening the servers I've actually just now submitted a request to give all of hacker news direct access to the infrastructure via SSH. I'll let you know what they say.

- I work at NR, my words are terrible and unfit for any purpose but especially investment advice. If you read them and make bad decisions this paragraph is designed to prevent me from going to Martha-Stewart-jail. I hear they have tennis but I quite like choosing my own clothing.

Stagnant seems like an overstatement given 500 commits on one of the agents alone in the last month. There is surely a way to criticize without devaluing the unread contributions of literally hundreds of developers.

I personally am much more motivated by seeing customers encouraged to add support for their favorite libraries and frameworks than scoring their sweet free codes, but I suppose there is potentially a sinister motive behind everything in life... like open source.

Didip! Long time - I'm back at NR as of a month ago after 5yrs away.

We did have all the agent code out in the open but it was more "source available" than it was open source. You could see what was happening but not build on it and use it for your own nefarious purposes as you can now.